North East Bytes - Microsoft Technology Usergroup in the North East of England

For our December event we've got Christos Matskas from Microsoft giving us a talk on the new kid on the block - .NET Core.

Please note the change of venue for this month, we're back to Newcastle University at Claremont Tower!

Microsoft’s NET Core is going to rock your world

Christos is a software developer, blogger, speaker and all around
geek. He currently works for Microsoft as an Azure Dev Premier Field
Engineer. Before joining Microsoft, he was a successful entrepreuner
collaborating with companies such as MarkIT, Lockheed Martin and
Barclays. He's been building software for over 12 years and he's a
passionate Open Source advocate. He contibutes regularly to numerous OSS
projects and works closely with the developer community to make the
space bigger and better.

NET Core has been written from the ground up to be the best web
development platform for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can now use your
favorite editor to create faster, leaner and more memory efficient NET
applications that work everywhere. In this session, you'll get an
introduction to the major advancements and an overview of what's changed
in the new, brave world of .NET Core. You'll also get the chance to see
how you can create ASP.NET
Core apps that leverage all the new front-end tooling like npm, Bower,
Grunt and Gulp to make development easier. This is going to be session
full of demos and information that promises to rock your world!

As per usual there'll be networking
over pizza during the sessioin break. Christmas jumpers are optional!

After a hiatus that took longer than we'd intended we're
back with our November event. As usual we're at Campus North but we've
got a change of date - it's a Thursday this month rather then the usual
Wednesday.

Building Realtime apps with RethinkDB and Node.JS - Matt Collins

In todays online world, user experience is key. Users expect slick
interfaces that are intuitive, informative and engaging. More and more,
building apps that update the user in Realtime are becoming an essential
part of this experience - and we can see this every day with things
like Google Docs, Facebook Notifications, Slack and BBC Live Text.

RethinkDB is a fully featured, opensource, NoSQL database designed to
make developing for the Realtime Web easy. We'll talk about
changefeeds, clustering and how combining with Node.js can help you
avoid some of the pitfalls of building rich, engaging, Realtime Apps to
scale and across multiple platforms.

By the end of this talk you be ready to go back to the office and create your first Realtime App with RethinkDB and Node.

Writing your First Mobile Application using Xamarin - Dave Mawer

Dave Mawer is a Senior Developer who has been
working at Sage UK Ltd for 4½ years and is currently working on the Sage
200 team enhancing the Sage 200 product suite. His interests outside
of work include cycling, following Liverpool FC and writing simple
mobile applications using Xamarin.

In this talk Dave will introduce the Xamarin add on
for Visual Studio, explain two different approaches to writing a mobile
phone application and then demonstrate implementing a simple Android mobile
application to display data from a Twitter account.

Heading into the summer, hot on the heals of June's DevOps fest we're mixing it up a bit with one MS talk and one Google talk...

Considering Compliance in Office 365 - John Timney

This
session provides a top down view of the Office 365 Compliance Center,
delivered by veteran Office Server and Services MVP John Timney. A
business and operations focused session describing why we need to
understand the key aspects of this service around archiving and
retention, e-discovery, advanced e-discovery and audit. The session
considers not only the features in Office 365, but the issue of
legality, EU Compliance and the EU-US Privacy Shield, data sovereignty
and the possible impact of Brexit on service owners. If you work in a
regulated industry and are considering or have already adopted Office
365 and Azure then this is a must see session to ready you for a
compliant business.

Introdution to Go - Jon Bulmer

The
Go programming language was invented by Alan A A Donovan and Brian W
Kernighan in 2007. It is Google's project, intended to offer speed and
dynamic development. Now at version 1.6 it is a fairly new language and
this can show at times. It works best in web service and network
environments.

I will start with a look at the tutorials on the
golang site. https://tour.golang.org/welcome . This is an amazing site
that gets you up to speed with the language, writing your code directly
into the web browser with syntax and compiler help. As you work through
the tutorials and do the exercises, you gain confidence. I will finish
this section of the talk by completing the Fibonacci closure exercise.

Then
I will move onto the Latte Panda. This is a fully functional 2G/32GB
Windows 10 PC, built on a card with USB, HTMI and Ethernet connection.
It also includes a wifi card. All this for $109 my unit is in a cool
bamboo case. I have installed the Go compiler on it and will demonstrate
a web service running on it written with Go.

We'll be in Campus North, most likely the classroom but the final venue is still to be confirmed.

This month we are very happy to welcome back MVPs Richard Fennell and Rik Hepworth from Black Marble to talk DevOps:

The dream of any DevOps solution is to make the provisioning and deployment to environments seamless. In this session we will show you how this dream can be achieved using the latest advances in Visual Studio Team Services and Azure.

We will show how you can use utilise Azure Resource Templates to define your environment then the latest features of VSTS Release Management to create an end to end deployment of you environment and application, with appropriate testing.

We will also discuss how these techniques could potentially be used for on-premises scenarios now and in the future.

We're meeting in Campus North's Auditorium, through the back of Bunker Coffee and Kitchen on the corner of Carliol Square. Come along from 18:00 and grab a drink - the presentation will start at 18:30.

Feeling like we're nearly into summer yet?! Come along to this months
NEBytes for some cool beer, a good talk and some tech chat...

Demistifying Rx - Sam Hogarth

The
Reactive Extensions (Rx) began as a Microsoft project and has grown
into an open-source, multi-language set of libraries. Using Rx you can
easily compose asynchronous, event-driven programs by building
Observable streams and performing operations on those streams. If you're
familiar with LINQ you're pretty much there. In this talk we'll take an
introductory look into how Rx works, how you can build applications
using Rx (including testing!) and take an in-depth look into how some of
the key operations work using marble diagrams.

Sam Hogarth is a Senior Developer at Scott Logic, where he spends his
time building web-based trading platforms using React. He has five years
experience working across the investment banking and applied science
sectors, developing for the web, desktop and mobile.

---

We
don't have a fixed session for the second slot this month but will
instead continue with Jon's Magical technology rating game that seemed
to go down quite well a couple of months back.

This month we happen to line up the day before the Microsoft Web Platform roadshow hits town (more info here - mswebday.net). As such we have our own webby topic ready for you and are delighted to have John Staveley coming up from Leeds who will be taking over both sessions with his master class on:

.NET MVC Website Security - John Staveley

The
number and frequency of attacks on websites in the news is increasing
steadily and effects can be devastating. However for each company that
you hear about there are many more who cover up or are unaware of
breaches on their sites. Thus what you hear about in the news represents
just the tip of the iceburg. This primer session on security focusses
on the major risks and the practical steps you can take now in your
software development to protect an ASP.Net Mvc website from the major
threats in the web today and will include code you can take away and
implement in your own sites. Each type of attack will be introduced in a
technology agnostic way, then highlighted with some case studies using
major breaches as examples, then finally countermeasures which you can
use will be proposed for each risk. The attacks I will be looking at
are:

SQL Injection

Session hijacking

Password hacking

Weak account management

XSS

Insecure direct object references

Misconfiguration

Sensitive data exposure

Missing Function Level Access Control

CSRF

Unvalidated redirects and forwards

Form overposting

DDOS

Social Engineering

A sample code project is included as part of the talk which helps mitigate against all of these threats and more.

The cloud is often presented as the cool new technology everyone
should use as well as SaaS being the answer for businesses reluctant to
purchase and service their own hardware. For a SaaS provider, balancing
the cost of cloud computing against performance can be challenging when
it's not clear of the amount of load to expect, how the system will be
used or if use will change over time.

Machine Learning is just
one of a series of new technologies and services that are available on
Microsoft's Azure platform and offers new possibilities to answer this
challenge. In this presentation we'll look at an application of AML, in
combination with other Azure services, that can make predictions about
customer behaviour and scale out to provide a better customer experience
without breaking the bank.

Derek Graham

Derek has worked at almost every level of the software development food-chain over the last 20plus
years. He has experience in real-time motion control, ERP stock control
and barcoding systems, software licensing, developer tooling and
shrink-wrapped software.

He is a Principal Developer at Sage UK, helping to deliver cloud-based business solutions in .Net on Azure.

His
main areas of interest are in using agile methods to help improve what
we ship, XP, TDD, continuous and deliberate learning, visual thinking,
design and, of course, code. He may also be hastening the coming of our
robot overlords.

Properly Rated? - Jon Noble

Lets see about getting a bit of a discussion going... All will be revealed on the night!

For our second meeting of 2016, NEBytes welcomes back Peter Bull, and new speaker Jon Bulmer.

In the Groove - Developing with Groove Music - Peter Bull

Groove
Music is the music platform from Microsoft available on desktop,
tablet, phone, console and web but also features a powerful and free to
use API for developers.

Windows 10 and .NET Developer, Peter
Bull, will go through how to use the Groove Music API and .NET SDK and
share his experiences of developing using Groove Music in his own
application for Windows 10, TuneCardr.

Fogbugz integration with Kiln - Jon Bulmer

I
am active participant of NEBytes and DDD North. I am a senior developer
at a national company based in Teesside, I work with Code Club helping
with the development of young talent coming out of our schools. This
will be my first demonstration of a product aimed at helping the
software developer. I have worked with Fogbugz and Kiln for a few years
now and find it helpful with the management of projects.In the team
environment and working on my personal projects.

I will be
demonstrating how I set up milestones for an objective in a project,
that can be sliced up into tasks divided up in a team. Set time scales
and review the outcomes of development that can bring the teams work
together, ready for a deadline agreed in the milestone. This can and
does work with multiple developers working with the same file or files
independently.

Costing
SharePoint projects, or any projects for that matter can be really
difficult, but what if you could simplify that dramatically by looking
at data science and Azure.

Bring on machine learning and you
suddenly have an opportunity to amalgamate your legacy cost information
to better predict future outlay for pretty much anything. What makes it
even better is that it’s not really very hard to start using Azure
Machine Learning and then to move on to looking at alternative
strategies for other types of predictive outcomes, and you don’t have to
be an experienced data scientist to dip your toe in the water and get
real fiscal potential from drag and drop solutions in Azure.

"Machine
Learning" made its first appearance on the Gartner Hype cycle chart
this year, but has already past the peak of inflated expectations and
now takes the place of Big Data as a critical skill for business to
acquire.

Join SharePoint MVP John Timney as he takes you through
this exciting and must learn thing that is AML, provides some light
touch insight into its operational domain and demonstrates how to start
taking early advantage of it.

In addition, NEBytes own
Jonathan Noble will be talking about adopting some DevOps practices with
Visual Studio Team Services (formerly Visual Studio Online):

Making your Operations workload more visible with Visual Studio Team Services

Developers
may have been using similar tools for a while, but in the DevOps era
it's time for the sys admins to catch up. Visual Studio Team Services
offers a number of features that operations folk can take advantage of,
whether you're closely collaborating with devs or not.

Microsoft
MVP for Cloud and Datacenter Management, Jonathan Noble, will share his
experience with VSTS's Kanban board and work item queries for better
visualising Work In Progress, and tying that in to hosted version
control for PowerShell scripts, DSC configurations, etc.

We are very pleased this month to welcome back the speaking powerhouse of Mike Taulty... Mike will be joining us to talk about the changes in the updated Universal App Platform for Windows 10... Mike will be taking over the whole session and we expect high demand so make sure you register early!

It’s
the end of a journey to unify Windows. It’s the beginning of a journey
for developers who want to take advantage of a universal app platform
available across all Windows devices.

In this session, we’ll dig
into what’s changed in Windows 10 for the Windows app developer. We’ll
talk about the Universal App Platform that makes it possible to build
code that runs on all Windows devices and about the Extension platforms
for code that targets specific device families.

We’ll stay in Visual Studio as much as is possible and we’ll lean towards C# and XAML.

Mike's Bio:

Mike
Taulty works in the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft in the UK
where he has spent the past few years helping developers understand and
get the best from the Microsoft platform. Prior to this, Mike spent 3
years with Microsoft Consulting Services as a consultant on developer
technologies.

Before joining Microsoft, Mike spent the previous 9
years working as a software developer for a number of enterprises,
consultancies and software vendors working with a variety of operating
system, client, communication and server technologies. You can find more
of a complete career history over on LinkedIn.

Mike holds a BSc Hons (1st Class) in Computer Science from the University of Leeds.